I asked you what you needed to clean from your mind as you pulled on your trousers and turned back to me, your dark hair falling over your forehead.

“Different things. Work. The future. And you? What clears your head?”

“Reading,” I said without needing to think.

“Oh yeah? What are you reading right now? Anything good?”

I couldn’t bear to look at you while I thought. The sky had turned an even darker blue, and I felt safe in the dimming light.

“Right now, nothing. But I’m starting a new book soon, and I think it’ll be really good.” I thought of Giovanni’s Room, hidden at the bottom of my bag, its precious pages waiting to be read.

“What’s it called?”

You sat next to me. I looked at you, the air in my throat suddenly immobile and heavy, my mind reeling. I didn’t know why I’d let myself bring up this secret, tried hard to think of another title to tell you. The distant sound of the camp bell rang through the air, stirring us both. Then an odd silence between us, like something balancing on an edge, deciding which way to fall.

“It’s dinnertime,” you finally said, rising. “C’mon. I’m starving.”

We walked to the camp, back through the fields, the light fading. I felt peculiarly close to you, and happy to have you all to myself with nothing but the sky looking at us. I asked where you had learned to swim so well, and you told me that there was a river not far from your house, where you had played with your brothers. You said that they had taught you.

“And in the summer we’d go around the mountains and swim in the other rivers there,” you said.

“Where?”

“Near Rabka. By the Tatra Mountains.”

“A southern boy,” I said, smiling.

You nodded. “Can’t you tell from my accent?”

“Now that you say it, yes.” Some of the words you said, even later, were inflected with a drawl, pulling the last syllable out like pliable dough.

“And you?”

“Wrocław.”

“A city boy, huh?” Your eyes flashed in the dark.

By then we had reached the camp. We stopped in front of the canteen, as if we’d agreed on it before.

“See you tomorrow,” you said, putting your hand on my shoulder for a moment and then going in, leaving me standing outside.

That night I took Giovanni’s Room out of the deepest recesses of my bag and started reading it by torchlight after the others had fallen asleep. It scared and comforted me—even just the first few pages. The narrator’s guilt toward his fiancée, his desire for Giovanni, and the deep regret for whatever it is he did to him. There was something about the rhythm, the language, about the knowledge implied and the sense of internal doom, that spoke directly to me. This wasn’t distraction or entertainment: here was a book that seemed to have been written for me, which lifted me up into its realm and united me with something that seemed to have been there all along and that I seemed to be a part of. It felt as if the words and the thoughts of the narrator—despite their agony, despite their pain—healed some of my agony and my pain, simply by existing.